Favorite Concert Tales

This may be in the wrong forum, so mods if you want to move it to MPSIMS, that’s cool, but here goes.

What are your favorite concert stories? The coolest performer, the best stage banter, the wildest pit, the coolest stage show, the most fun crowd, your stupid friends, etc.

Probably the wildest concert I’ve been to was Slipknot during the Pledge of Allegiance Tour. Cory (their singer) got everyone to get down on their knees, and when the song hit, everyone jumped as high as they could, resulting in a pit bigger than most venues I go to. There was no way out, and no control. I saw people having limbs broken and going down, but nobody had any control over where they were going, it was all just this blinding mass of noise and pain and rush, and it ruled. 100% kicked ass.

What’s yours?

LC

Well, there was the time I wrote to Billy Joel before a concert to thank him for writing my favorite song (not one of his “hits”), and he played it at the concert because “someone wrote me a letter.” :eek:

Even Mr. S agrees that I’m allowed to say it was the best day of my life.

Well, at the Hollywood Bowl, I saw Arthur Fiedler conduct once. (I was very young, and this was shortly before he died.) The thing I remember was his bright red jacket. He loved firemen, and always wore red jackets!

I also saw Aaron Copland conduct (also at the Hollywood Bowl) which was very cool. (Once again, I was young, and this was shortly before he died.)

But I hold a special place in my heart for the time when Jerry Goldsmith had a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. (Goldsmith is a film composer, and my favorite!) He played bits from all his best works (and some more obscure ones, like the themes to “Room 222” and “Barnaby Jones”) and he played themes from “Star Trek”, “The Wind and the Lion”, “The Shadow” and all sorts of wonderful pieces. Between each piece, he’d tell a story about the film project, who he worked with, how he got the ideas he got - he was very engaging. And the orchestra was wonderful.

The neatest thing was at the end, when he played a piece that he had composed especially for Los Angeles (since he is a native). It was a beautiful piece (I await a CD!) and the Hwd. Bowl had a fireworks display during the performance! It was really fantastic.

My post in this thread says it all for memorable concerts.

It is forever embedded in my mind. And it was definitely wild, alright.

This is just totally cool. I always liked Billy Joel, more so now.
Not my story, but a friend of mine.

He is a HUGE Springsteen fan. Member of the fan club. Has been around the globe seeing Bruce play. This guy is actually married, too. Some how, he always manages to score excellent seats.

At one of the last concerts he went to with his wife (who tolerates her husbands obession), it was after the concert ( I think) and they were hanging out talking with friends and they had been taking pictures of the “gang” and his wife just put the contraband camera away in her fanny pack.

My friend is leaning against the stage, when who pops his head out between the curtains behind the equipment, but Mr. Bruce Springsteen. My friend hollers to him if it would be ok to take his picture. Bruce nods. My friend then realizes his wife is in the bathroom with the camera. Bruce gave my friend a smile & a shrug and went behind the curtian.

This same friend - years ago - had his girlfriend taken up on stage to dance with Bruce.

Oh man… I have so many. I don’t go to that many concerts, but I always have good stories about them. :slight_smile:

Funniest concert tale:

My dad and I are big Black Sabbath fans, and we used to go to Ozzfest every year. The first year we went, we sat behind this stewed prune who periodically turned around to us during Tool’s set and started babbling “I TOLD you they rocked! It’s TOOL, MAN! They fucking ROCK!!” He did this for about half the set, then he fainted and his friends carried him away.

The very next year, we get kick-ass seats that are about 30 rows back from the stage. We show up at about 5 in the afternoon and get our seats. As soon as we sit down, two security guards come up the aisle dragging a drunk who’s fighting them every step of the way. When they come past us, the guy pretends to slip and fall. We get a good look at his face, and IT’S THE SAME GUY!

Runner-up for Funniest Concert Tale

My best friend and I go to Rage Against the Machine. We had floor seats, and the floor turned into a giant mosh pit (not particularly dangerous, though.) We were both covered in sweat and Creeping Mullet Disease by the end of the night. Even our pants were completely soaked.

We were also the only girls there who weren’t wearing hoochie shirts, attached to some ugly mullet’s left arm alongside two lite beers in plastic cups, and wearing a surly lipsticked expression. We were the only girls who were there without any sort of male escort, the only girls who knew any of the songs, and the only girls who cheered for the band. Everyone within earshot turned and looked at us and turned away, muttering “lesbians.”

Okay, you kind of had to be there. Take my word for it, it was funny.

Wildest Concert Tale

Definitely the Metallica show (The Pre-“Load” Metallica show!) I saw. It was held in the middle of Southern Illinois in a big fairground, and populated entirely by smelly bikers and their big sweaty mamas, full of beer and crank. A riot broke out at the end of it. They were letting us out of the fenced-in lot two at a time, and a couple of people just started shaking the fence until they ripped it right off the posts. The entire thing just - went. Hundreds of us ran under the fence as people picked off other posts. I split before the cops showed up. :eek:

Silky,that is one very funny story.

The first concert I ever went to, I was 8 years old. My cousin took me to see Billy Joel, and the girl sitting in front of me puked an entire pint of cherry vodka onto the floor near my feet. This was an omen, but it didn’t prevent me from attending future concerts. Lots and lots of them. Here are some memorable highlights.

The Joe Perry Project opening for ZZ Top: Joe Perry was a last-minute addition to the bill when the scheduled opener (38 Special, IIRC) backed out. The ZZ Top crowd didn’t realize who Joe Perry was (sacrilege!) and had no patience for the technical difficulties that the band was having. First they booed, then they started chucking beer bottles. Joe responded by cutting the set short, pulling up a monitor, and heaving it back at the crowd.

Ratt opening for Night Ranger: Funniest on-stage moment. They were doing the synchronized “jerk the head of the guitar up” move beloved of all hair bands, when bass player Juan Croucier got the tuning pegs caught in his extremely curly hair and de-tuned his bass mid-song. It took several roadies to get him loose.

Megadeth opening for Alice Cooper: Ooh, was I looking forward to this show. But Dave Mustaine had some kind of… personal crisis halfway through the first song. He stopped playing, announced “I’ll be right back. Chat amongst yourselves”, and left the stage. The rest of the band looked confused, launched into a “jazz odyssey” type jam for a few minutes, then wandered off one by one. (No, they didn’t come back.)

Dokken: They were really popular in the mid to late 80s, trust me. Popular enough that they shouldn’t have been booked into a hall that was held only 1,000 people. Popular enough that the promoter was able to oversell the general admission tickets by 3 times capacity, breaking all fire codes and rules of common sense. Selling alcohol was probably a bad idea, too. What happens when you pack 3,000 sweaty fans into a teeny tiny hall and add beer? I lost both my shoes and some chunks of hair in the ensuing mayhem, and my friend got a bloody nose, but we wound up at the front of the stage. :wink:

Peter Frampton: They were selling beer in buckets at this show, with lids about the size of a margarine tub. Didn’t take long for those lids to start flying around like frisbees. We had good seats, about four rows back. The venue had unusual chairs, with backs thick enough to stand on if you had good balance, so everyone did. During the set, a drunken lout two rows in front of me tried to catch one of the “frisbees”, lost his balance, fell backwards, and set off a domino reaction that spread back about 20 rows. It was so spectacular the musicians were coming to the front of the stage and squinting into the darkness, trying to figure out why half the floor audience abruptly vanished. (I landed two rows back, in some guy’s lap. My friend who was very petite fell straight through her seat, which folded up around her head. It took a security guy with a screwdriver to get her out.)

David Lee Roth: Some guy enjoyed the show so much he stripped all his clothes off and ran buck naked up and down the bleachers, pursued by security.

Painful concert moment:

Primus in San Diego. Smashing mosh pit during “Jerry was a Race Car Driver” I am standing at the side watching the toughs throwing around and some chick decided to show off how tough she was. She starts running in the pit and clobbering guys by kicking them in the NUTS. She lets fly with 3 hard slams on guys, takes them out, then rolls behind this big bald headed guy. She lets fly and the guy whirls and DECKS this girl with the hardest left I had seen in a while. The girl FLIES backwards, lands near me totally out and her nose spewing blood, along with her mouth. I see the guy later getting his fist bandaged up and find that he had her two front TEETH buried in between his knuckles and was going to get them taken out of his fingers.

The girl got carried to the backstage. Never saw what happened to her
Funniest:
Ramones concert Seattle. Joey is beating out some great floggin songs and pauses…very unusual. He then starts cracking up and says “OH wow man thats pretty sick” The camera man for the big overheads follows what he is lookin at and we catch a HUGE hairy ass of a roadie as he is mounting his girlfriend behind a banner off the stage that we would not see and normally the band wouldnt if Joey was not leaning over the edge. The guy did not even notice and kept going and the band started counting off the beats as we all chimed in yelling ‘go go go!’ All the Ramones were in complete hysterics as was the crowd as he finally figured out that the music was matching his thrusts. We gave him a standing O as his face came up on the overheads as he ran for more cover.

Coolest:

Rocking in New Years Eve with Social Distortion at the Coach House. It was their first club gig in like 6 years (they played arena venues for a long time) and Mike Ness was on FIRE. The Coach House has big long tables coming off the stage and during my favorite song, Mike walks the length and stops right at my groups seat and does his solo on his knees in front of all of us. We could smell the oil off the strings as he wailed hard and we went batshit. He tossed me a pick and walked back. Singing “Story of My Life” with 300 hardcore D fans as we rang in the new year was a highlight of my life.

The amazing The Dirty 3 in March 1997 - a night I will never forget.

The first hour of the show the band were pretty much slacking off, not playing with very much fire, but as the liquor started to kick in, violinist/frontman Warren Ellis started getting a little crazy, first climbing up on top of the speaker stacks to play, then jumping into the crowd next to us to watch the rhythm section kicking out the jams, then passing his violin out into the audience to be played in suitably squawking fashion.

Then, in the first encore, things started getting a little crazy, as Warren reached out and grabbed my hand and started dragging me upwards. I looked up at him confused, wondering whether he wanted me to do backing vocals :wink: (the band are fully instrumental), and he then pulled up all of my friends and some others there to jump up and down on the stage. The racket they were making at that point was pretty much the greatest thing I’d ever heard - like being there to hear the Velvets playing Sweet Sister Ray.

Finally, Warren put his violin in the bass drum, feedback screeching, as Jim White on drums played a simultaneous violin and drum solo. Warren again jumped into the crowd, and invited everyone to stay back for drinks on him. The hometown crowd went wild. The comment from a friend who was there and drove us home, who is a huge Slayer/Iron Maiden/Metallica fan - “I’ve seen some pretty good drummers in my life, but that guy is a complete ANIMAL”.

Warren, Jim and Mick, where the hell are ya? We want you back in Melbourne!

Scariest- A tie between Drowning Pool, and Papa Roach.

Drowning Pool- Saw them at this club called the Boathouse…Really low ceilings, so it gets hot fast. Crowd was pretty excited…Pushing, jumping, shoving, with a couple of mosh pits going at all times. Final song of the night was “Bodies”, and for those of you who know the song,the bodies really DID hit the floor that night.

Papa Roach- Same club, except the middle of summer, and hot as hell. Capacity crowd, and everyone was trying to get close to the stage. Several times I was being moved through the crowd, with my feet never touching the floor. The first time I was actually afraid at a concert, because if you had fallen down, there would have been no getting up. After the show was over, I kept expecting to see a few crushed remains. (I got a pick though!)


Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons!
~Did you love before? Did they love you for you? -Better Than Ezra

My best has to be Ozzfest 2000 in Pittsburgh. Sabbath, Pantera, Static-X, Godmack, Disturbed, Primer 55, and a bunch of others. I was in more pits that day than all the concerts I’ve been to combined. It rained earlier in the day so there wqas this huge mud/sod throwing going on during Static-X. I can’t describe it, you had to be there.

The first time I went to see Rammstein, I was working backstage and i had an all access pass. The band didn’t arrive until 3:00 pm and until that very moment I wasn’t quite sure what they would look like. (I had only seen the Du Hast video).

Well, I was on the walkie talkie and here comes six, stern looking OBVIOUSLY not American guys in dark suits, very neat, very clean. They nodded to me as they got off their bus and I clicked on the walkie talkie and said, “My friends. Rammstein has arrived.”

Because I had all access, I thought that I would watch the show from the stage, from the wings like I usually do. But Achim (the big bald roadie) came up to me and said, “You must leave”. I showed him my pass and said I wanted to watch the show and he said “Go stand in the front row. But not here. You can’t.”

“I have a pass”

“I’m telling you to leave. This whole stage will be on fire.”

So I stood in the front row.

And I got to go to a bar with Rammstein afterwards and talk with them and watch Paul set his own arm on fire by pouring shots on it. So it was a good time.

Definitely the most influential concert of my life.

jar

Dead show: Hullabaloo on the field during intermission. Borrow binoculars and look at group of security just in time to see male full frontal nudity (yuk) as some guy just had to get naked. (probably the “bugs”)

'Nother Dead show: Guy behind me goes from mild mannered dead head to full-out flailing LSD junkie to sleeping-it-off dead head over the course of about 45 minutes.

Yet another Dead show: RFK Stadium in DC. Second set. Drums>Space>Casey Jones with Bobby coming onto the stage with the biggest assed set of diesel locomotive air horns and just opening the place up.

Kinks: Big hairy biker dude sitting next to me lifts his shirt to remove the booze he had smuggled in. He ingeniously sealed it in a Seal-a-meal bag and Duct Taped it to his chest!! :eek:

NRBQ: friend of mine grew up with the Spampinato’s and took me backstage to hang with Terry, Tom, Joey and Johnny (Big Al had left the band).

Ramones: Standing on the upper deck at Hammerjacks and watching girls in the front rows lift their shirts to Joey Ramone.

Ramones: Watching a diver climb to the top of the speaker stack and swan dive onto the mosh pit, which had just moved, causing him to land chest first on the wood floor.

Buddy Guy: Buddy Guy walking around the arena during a loooooooong jam and basically sweating on me.

Keb Mo’: Back stage, Keb smiled at me and said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to see you live, too!”

Hanging out with many a bluegrass great (Late John Duffy, Mac Wiseman, Charlie Waller, Allison Krause [grrrrrr], Little Roy Lewis, Bobby and Sonny Osbourne)

Bob Dylan: Friend got free tickets. We didn’t know that they were front row. After the show, Bob walked over to where the girl next to me tried to jump up on the stage and I shook his hand. (I still haven’t washed it, in case you DC are dopers were wondering what that smell was. :slight_smile: )

Ritchie Havens: At Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis. After closing with Motherless Chile/Freedom he goes back stage. Five minutes later, the crowd is still screaming. He comes back out and the crowd screams louder. He picks up his guitar and the place goes totally nuts. He puts it back down and starts singing “On the turning away” a capella. The crowd is instantly silent. People are too respectful to breathe loudly. Awesome, literally.

Most Embarassing:

This was maybe 15 years ago. I had just started working nights and my little brother, me and two other people were going to see the Kinks. I don’t remember who opened for them. We were drinkin’ and probably smokin’ and I had been up for maybe twenty hours when we got to Alpine Valley for the concert.

The Kinks come up on stage and I remember them doin’ “Come Dancing” and maybe two other songs, then, I fall asleep. I do not pass out, I fall asleep. When I wake up, my little bro says “It’s over.” I said, “What’s over” Well, I missed the whole concert including 10,000 people up on their feet singin “Lola”, yep, I slept through it. I really still can’t believe that, yikes.

We still laugh about that occasionally.

Which song was it? I’ll guess ‘Summer, Highland Falls.’ He put on one of my favorite concerts, and I got to enjoy it 1st row balcony with my mother. We had a blast.

Best mosh pit experience was Soundgarden circa 1992. Chris Cornell generates so much energy live, it was truly surreal. Two summers ago I ended up in a mosh pit during Kid Rock’s set, but at this point I’m only annoyed by moshing. Kid Rock was very good nonetheless. Metallica was a letdown after that set.

Best overall concert had to be Phish, Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation, New Year’s Millennium. So many incredible episodes spread out over the three day affair. Cheesecake! By the end I was weeping with exhaustion and joy. Also despair at having to leave basically right after the last note was played to get my ass back to Chicago to check the computers for Y2K bugs. The whole thing was life-changing in retrospect.

Picture it. It’s a cool night at the Berkeley Square club on University in lower Berkeley. Any parking not directly on University Avenue is in micro-neighborhoods that no one wants to be caught out in after dark. Of course, there’s never any available parking on University Avenue. After locking my car, I start walking towards the club while reciting my bad neighborhood mantra: Shit, shit, shit. I make it to the door, and sure enough, my name has not shown up on the comp list. It wouldn’t really matter if it did, ‘cause the door guy never consults it anyway.

I pay my four bucks and head inside. I grab a beer and walk out onto the floor near the stage. Even though I’m two hours late, the music hasn’t started yet. As a matter of fact, the roadies are just now getting around to tuning and doing a soundboard check. As I hear the echoes of “check, check” and “two, sibilant, two”, I wonder why they even bother. It’s not like anyone knows how to operate a sound board once the music starts anyway. The sound person is usually quite aware of from whence the oleo on their bread comes, and so cranks the knobs all the way to the right of who ever has the biggest and most abusive ego in the band. Unsurprisingly, this usually leads to all knobs for every PA and mike being pegged on ten, for, as foxholes lack atheists, so do bands generally lack self-validating participants.

As the clock nears midnight, the nine o’clock show is just about to get underway. The club is jammed now, and finally a sign of life other than the roadies starts to be visible in the wings, or, in the case of a club this small, the wing. And out on stage they stumble. As is typical, they look well into their cups, and the quart bottle of well-brand tequila one of them totes by the neck suggests that things are only going to get nastier as the evening, (or by now, morning), progresses. I do notice one unusual thing straight away however – usually it’s Marie who wears the g-string and tube top, but tonight Donny has adopted the look and Marie looks almost mundane in leather hotpants, a tight Menudo t-shirt (post Ricky Martin), Docs, and a necklace made from a ball-gag. The backing band is decked out in matching Dockers, polo shirts, and white straw cowboy hats, providing ironic sartorial counterpoint to the stars.

With Marie screaming “ein zwie drei vier!”, the band launches into a slamming version of “I’m a Little Bit Country”. As brother and sister bellow out the lyrics, the crowd explodes into an instant frenzy. Usually, it takes awhile for the hipper-than-thou college music crowd to warm up to the extent that anything more then golf-claps is given in the way of laudation, but on this night, the chaotic energy is palpable from the very first power chord, and the crowd is sucked in immediately. This isn’t about fun, this is rock and roll. Beer cans fly through the air, people crowd surf and dive off the little plywood stage, and people slam into each other only to carom away non-stop, as if an unspoken mutual agreement had been reached by the crowd to act out the roles of vibrating molecules in a life-sized group impression of an in-use microwave oven.

I look around in wonder as I’m jostled back and forth. I notice that some stars had come out to see the show. As the crowd undulates, I notice Gibby Haines and Sherman Hemsley moshing next to each other. Hemsley looks right at me without seeing, and I notice that not only are his pupils of a size other than normal, they are even a different size from each other. As I muse to myself that this is what George Jefferson would look like if drawn by Ralph Steadman, Hemsley is repeatedly yelling “MOTHERF*CKER!” over and over, with no variance in tone or modulation. As I turn back to the stage, I see Ann Jillian leap off of it in a beautiful swan dive just as Marie spits out a mouthful of tequila. By now, the band’s not even really playing songs, but just conducting a medley of counter-culture pop hits. Segueing from a raunchy cover of Terry Jacks’ “Seasons In The Sun”, Donny explodes into a raging retelling of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”.

Thirty minutes later, it’s all over. Marie has fallen down, and is dragged like a deadweight sack of cement off the stage. Donny and the backing musicians have kicked the drum set over, and a bit of shrapnel from a destroyed Ibanez Flying-V has left a cut on my cheek as pieces of it flew through the crowd. Slipping on sweat, blood, and vomit, I make my way outside.

Now to make it back to my car alive.

Not! It was “Vienna,” which is pretty much my personal anthem. I always felt as if he’d written it just for me, so to have him PLAY it just for me was, um, massively overwhelming. (Or as Mr. S puts it, “She went batshit!”) Now I have vanity plates commemorating the event. :cool:

Purd: What, no chicken wire?